JOURNAL

This blog is about the maker's life. The teacher's path. The stitching and dyeing and printing of the craft of art cloth and art quilt. The stumbling around and the soaring, the way the words and the pictures come together. Poetry on the page and in the piecing of bright scraps together. The inner work and the outer journeys to and from. Practicalities and flights of fancy and fearful grandeur, trivial pursuits and tactile amusements. Expect new postings two or three times a week, unless you hear otherwise.

This meditation, which one does with first person affirmations timed with in and out breaths "(I am completely) (stopping)" is becoming a practice for me. I haven't been successful at sticking with meditation techniques that ask for 20 or 30 minutes a day: I'd rather be dancing, which is for me a moving meditation about being present in my body. Maisel's 6-breath focusing technique, more cerebral and left-brained bridging) is do-able for me, and seems to be giving me what I need as I move through my day. I can call on this technique whenever -- not just at a specified "meditation" time, or when I have a spare 20 minutes (hah!).

Yesterday, I knew I needed something specific to work with when I finished the meditation, so I had Linda trace my body on some large brown paper to use for pattern cutting. Then I headed to the studio, spread out the pieced blue background, dumped out some fabrics I had already auditioned during a previous visit to this work, and started fusing and cutting.

The women who inhabit my art quilts don't come to me full blown; they really do appear in the making, somehow communicating their insights and stories as I move through the design process. I've never been one of those artists who had a preset mental image or a schematic or detailed sketch or the final project, though I do sometimes use sketching as one of the stops on the journey. My starting place is generally with color or a color scheme, and with shapes and iconic doodles that are part of my tool box, those things that have come to my work over and over and have become part of my "style."

By the time I left the studio last night (for a really fun evening watching a DVD of Fat Actress) this new woman had found her place, stepping from one reality into the Cosmic swirls, juggling stories and moon spheres, leaving her watery scales to become part of the stars. As I worked I realised that Jill Bolte Taylor's story had worked its way into the piece, and that this was about that step from left to right brain. I'm not going to include a photo yet, I may want to enter this in one of those prestigious exhibits that don't allow prepublication, but I'll stick in a detail to give you a taste.